Tuesday, September 17, 2002

An Identity Crisis

Well, I’ve been trying to study for my algorithms quiz for the last hour and I think I know just about as much as I did when I started. I am honestly baffled to no end by this info. I tried going over my notes…didn’t make any sense. I tried going over the professor’s notes…didn’t make any sense (mainly because anything he writes makes close to no sense). I then moved onto our huge 1200 page text book to see if it explained it any better. It does, but in terms that I don’t understand and it manages to go on and explain the information I need for about 50 pages—all in notation I have had little to no exposure to. I have already come to terms with the fact that this class will be the worst grade I will ever get in my college career. I have decided that a “C” in this class will be acceptable to me, mainly because of a combination of me not knowing whether some summation is monotonomically increasing or not, what the recurrence relation of T(n) for a given recursive function is, what an asymptotic bound between g(n) and f(n) is, and honestly not giving a care in the world to trying to decipher what’s going on in this class. It’s classes such as this one that make me realize how much I really don’t want to be in computer science for the rest of my lifetime. I want to work with people, I want to think about the ethics of our society, I want to figure out why we do what we do, and I want to not see another logarithm or summation for the rest of my life. For this reason, I keep praying that I will be able to have enough money to stay here at SJU for an extra year to complete my philosophy major to complement the computer science BA I’ll have after this year. If you want, feel free to mail me money to help finance my dreams, and stave off my nightmares.

Now, on a lighter note, let’s talk about the shower in my apartment. This is the first shower I have ever had that has an identity crisis. Let me explain. As you probably guessed, I take showers on a daily basis. For the most part, our shower works like any other shower—the water shoots out at you as you get clean and then it runs off of you and down the drain. Simple enough. For some reason, though, every now and again, our shower will forget that it is a shower and instead try to be a bath tub. The water still shoots out at you and you still get clean, but as the water runs down to the drain, the shower drain decided it should just let it all build up and not go down the drain. That would be cute, wouldn’t it? I thought for a while that we might just have a clogged drain, but that obviously isn’t it because sometimes it clogs and becomes a pond, while other times the water goes down fast as ever. I chalk it up to previous abuse by a previous tenant of our apartment. This abuse to the poor shower caused it to have some type of trauma where it no longer knows who it is. I am currently contacting numerous shower psychologists to help with this problem. Don’t worry, shower, we’ll make it through this……

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